Last weekend was all about shaping solutions for pressing issues and showing possibilities of A.I. and Blockchain. For at least 20 out of the 100 teams competing in the Odyssey Hackathon, the real work has just started. On Monday, Odyssey Ignite kicked-off the decentralized incubation program of the 20 winning teams, together with a fully supportive ecosystem and four super accelerators.
Odyssey is far more than just a Hackathon. With a series of meetups and deep dives leading up to the big event and an incubation and acceleration program afterwards, Odyssey is all about following through and making sure great ideas come to full fruition. The Ignite program is the first moment to engage with the winning teams and their solutions to incubate an ecosystem with the challenge holders, key stakeholders, and investors.
Here are three of the winning teams who were backed by super accelerators:
Survival of the fittest robots
Kryha, the Nature 2.0 track winner, took their idea from last year to the next level. The team built a prototype for a hive mind platform for drones. This collective intelligence for robots (e.g. drones) could be tasked with aerial observations, exploration missions, disaster impact analysis, search & rescue missions and even rebuilding cities. This year, they’ve added ‘artificial natural selection’, where the weakest link in the chain of robots can be discarded.
The team was backed by super accelerator Antonio Senatore, the Global CTO and Co-lead Deloitte EMEA Blockchain Lab. Before joining the Blockchain Lab, Antonio was manager of Deloitte’s Big Data capabilities in the Technology Analytics team and curated the EMEA Big data Community of Practice, a network of Big Data practitioners.
No more lines at the airport
Checking in at the airport is always a hassle. On top of that, airlines are not allowed to store passenger data because of the GDPR regulations. Team ID Shapers found a way around that, by creating a digital passenger ID that lets the passenger control what they share and minimises GDPR risks for the airline. Passengers can share their data from their phone when they arrive at the airport and simply revoke the data once they land.
ID Shapers was backed by super accelerator and fintech entrepreneur Sandra Ro, the newly appointed CEO of the Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC). Conceived on Sir Richard Branson’s Necker Island, the GBBC is a Geneva-based non-profit, which launched formally during the 2017 Annual World Economic Forum Meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
NGOs with impact
BerChain from Berlin won the Scaling Wildlife track. Charity organizations and NGOs are facing increasing criticism for not being transparent enough. Is the money people donate well spent? Are projects successful? The team built a KPI report, a sort of social badge for NGO’s, backed by real data, showing the social impact of their efforts.
The team was backed by super accelerator Ewald Hesse, chair of the Energy Web Foundation. He is also co-founder and CEO of Grid Singularity, rooted in his extensive experience in the energy sector and acute interest in distributed business models, and serves as an advisor to blockchain investment firm Scytale Ventures and several start-ups.
